Read Online This Family of Mine: What It Was Like Growing Up Gotti by Victoria Gotti - Free Book Online

in one of them leaving for days at a time. One such incident sent my mother into an emotional tailspin because, as fate would have it, she found out she was pregnant shortly after she left Dad.
    Mom weighed her options. Years later, she would tell me, “It was all I thought about day and night; I couldn’t focus, couldn’t function. Your father and the pregnancy were all that was on my mind.” She considered different scenarios. As she would also later tell me, “I knew in my heart I still loved him and wanted this baby. But the circumstances and the timing couldn’t have been worse.”
    M Y MOTHER ARRIVED at the East Flatbush Women’s Center with tears in her eyes. She thought about her own mother—young, alone, and pregnant—and how badly that situation had turned out. As much as she detested the idea of getting an abortion, Mom was terrified of having the baby. But she realized she couldn’t gothrough with it, she couldn’t stamp out the life growing within her. She thought of the younger brother who had been aborted, and became nearly sick to her stomach at the notion of repeating “such a horrible and heinous act.”
    “And so I didn’t walk from the clinic,” Mom said. “I ran.”
    With nowhere else to turn, she reluctantly went back to the boardinghouse. Aunt Bessie was waiting at her usual perch, leaning out on the windowsill on the second story.
    “Hah!” the old woman chortled. “He went and kicked you out, huh?” She shook her head disdainfully. “Your Mr. Wonderful.”
    Mom ignored her nasty comments and calmly requested a room to rent. Preferably, she said, the same room she had occupied in the past.
    Bessie hacked and wheezed, and continued her mean, drunken rant. My mother let it wash over her. She thought for a moment about running away. But where would she go? She knew her husband, Willy, still loved her and would take her back in a heartbeat. They were not officially divorced, and not even the fact that she was carrying another man’s child would have mattered to him. But she was in love with my father, and no doubt believed—or at least hoped—that he would come looking for her. Mom would never admit it, but I believe that’s the real reason she went back to Aunt Bessie’s: it was the only known address my father had for her; this way, at least, he could find her.
    My mother went up to her room and unpacked her things. She didn’t have much, just a few frayed nightgowns, two or three suits for work, T-shirts and jeans, and her most treasured possession: a photograph of her and my father at the Copacabana in Manhattan. They often went there during the time they lived together. The night the picture was taken they were with Marie and Angelo Ruggiero, and the foursome look as though they had not a care in the world.

    L UCKILY , M OM’S STAY at the boardinghouse was short this time around. One night, while visiting my aunt Marie and uncle Angelo, my father showed up at their Brooklyn apartment. To my mother, my father appeared weary and defeated. She’d never seen him look so vulnerable. “As long as I live,” she said, “I will never forget that look on his face.”
    Dad’s tired eyes were glassy; Mom suspected he’d been drinking. At first she was surprised to see him there, but she quickly surmised that Angelo must have alerted him that my mother was expected to drop by that evening. Dad shuffled into the apartment, and all my mother could think was
Thank God I look good.
She was careful to do her makeup and put on a dress, just in case Dad stopped by.
    Dad stood inside the doorway of the apartment for a few awkward moments, with no one saying a word. Angelo and Marie weren’t sure whether they should stay or leave. The apartment was tiny, so leaving meant, quite literally, leaving the building. There was nowhere to seek privacy, so Angelo and Marie stayed. They hoped to encourage Mom and Dad to end their silly separation.
    It was my father who broke the uncomfortable